


A Time To Every Purpose

by MercuryGray



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: Background Relationships, Backstory, F/M, Historical References, Old Friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 07:11:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6109000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary did not honestly expect to see anyone she knew from New Hampshire at Mansion House Hospital. But when one of her old acquaintances from Manchester shows up, looking for a family member, Mary takes a bit of time to speak with her, and remember the old days - and learn a lesson that sometimes it takes an old friend to see things others don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Time To Every Purpose

 

It would not be so bad, Mary mused, if wars had seasons or tides. But, as it was, they had neither, the wounded coming, not in waves, but in a vast and never-ending flood of blood and half-broken bodies, diseased, delirious, insensible. No sooner had one man died but another took his place -- or one man, recovering, was replaced by another with still further to go. 

 

It was enough to make any woman forget the world around her, forget to mark a face or remember a man’s name, forget, even, for hours on end, to respond to anything beyond the impersonal cry of “Nurse…”

 

It was hardly surprising, then, that she barely thought to look up when someone said her name.

 

“Mary? Mary Phinney?”

 

It took her a moment to realize that it was not any of the usual voices that were calling to her, but an  _ unusual _ one -- a woman’s voice, and clearly unused to the protocols of the hospital, to use her Christian name. Mary turned, looking for the source, and found, in the dim recesses of the Mansion House Hospital lobby (or what had been the lobby, when the building had been a hotel; the word seemed ill-fitting now but they had not found one better) a woman in a plain, charcoal gray traveling costume, peering inquisitively from underneath a straw bonnet. The woman continued to study Mary, and then, upon finding her observation correct, smiled and half-laughed. “Mary Phinney, as I live and breathe!”

 

Mary, recovering herself quickly, peered anxiously beneath the bonnet and tried, restlessly, to place the face. “Laura ...Martineau?” she said, half-guessing at the name and hoping it was the right one out of the hundreds in her girlhood. The face beneath the bonnet smiled widely, and Mary had a sudden, better flash of inspiration, seeing that same smile, some six or seven years previous, across the dinner table at her lodging house in Manchester, brimming with joy at some joke or another. Laura. Yes, that was her name.

 

“I saw you and thought “I would know that face anywhere!’” the other woman confided, her smile sure now. “Though it seems strange to hear you call me Martineau; the name hardly seems mine any more.”

 

Mary suddenly remembered the slip of card in its envelope, with its doves flying over the names in elegant script, and the letter that had come with it, with its shaking signature, the hand unsure of how to write her new name. “It’s Bradley, now,” her friend replied, supplying the name Mary could not remember. “Five years this fall.”

 

“Bradley -- the mechanic,” Mary remembered, suddenly, another friendly face like Laura’s, a quiet smile behind a neat, dark beard, laughing at the railing with her Gustave as the girls passed by on the way to the mill gate. Laura nodded, fondness in her eyes. Mary’s eyes suddenly went wide at the realization of this news, and what it might mean to find her friend here, in Alexandria, in Mansion House. “You’re not --”

 

“Goodness, no!” Laura looked relieved. “Not him -- his brother. Nathan. 13th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. His wife’s poorly, so I’ve come instead. I don’t think you ever met him,” she added, obviously seeing some distress on Mary’s face about not having recognized the name on the patient list. “He was in Lowell for a time, when Harry and I were walking out.”

 

Mary nodded, trying to remember, now, what it was that she should do. Families of the wounded she saw every day, but not -- not ones she knew. The feeling was an odd one. Should she accompany her? Reassure her, somehow? 

 

Well, she might at least help her find the man, first. “Matron Brannan!” Mary said, flagging down the diminutive  Irishwoman,  fortuitously on her way down the stairs. “This is Mrs. Laura Bradley -- she’s come about her brother-in law, a private Nathan Bradley. Thirteenth New Hampshire Volunteers. Can you check the register for her so she may go and see him?”

 

“We’re full up on rooms at the present, if she’ll be wanting to stay here,” the Matron responded with her usual dry tone, reaching for the huge hospital book and running a careful finger down the list of names.

 

“I have a room in town,” Mrs. Bradley replied, suddenly looking very anxious under the eyes of the older woman - a feeling Mary knew quite well herself. “I didn’t think there’d be any accommodation here.”

 

“Sensible,” the Irishwoman responded, not raising her eyes from her register. “Ah, here we are. Bradley, Nathan, private. Bullet to the shoulder. Ward three. This way, Mrs. Bradley.”

 

“Thank you,” Laura said, turning away from Matron to look at Mary again. “Have they...have they a dinner bell in this wretched place, or must you keep your place at all hours?”

 

“I can take a quarter-hour for my tea, as time permits,” Mary said with a small shrug. Laura’s eyes went wide. 

 

“A quarter-hour, truly? They keep better hours in the Dover Mills!”

 

Mary couldn’t argue that. “We are short of help at present,” she acknowledged with another helpless shrug.

 

Her friend nodded, fixing Mary with a clear-eyed, world-wise look. “You always did manage to take the hardest place,” she remembered fondly.  _ Did I?  _ Mary wondered.  _ I don’t remember that. But memory plays strange tricks sometimes. _ “Well, it would make me very happy if I might see you again before I go, and ...catch up, about old times.” The wise look clouded over a bit, and Mary realized, for the first time in a long while, how hard it must have been to always be the smiling, laughing Laura that she was remembering from girlhood, Laura who never had a bad thing to say about anyone and who was always fair and just and willing to lend a hand to anyone who was asking. Laura who had probably laid aside everything without a second thought to catch a train to Alexandria to come and see her brother-in-law.  “I...I didn’t think to find anything but grief down here,” her friend was saying, “And I ...didn’t realize how much I needed to see a friendly face.”

 

_ Friendly. Now, there’s something I haven’t been called in a long time.  _ “I would like that, very much,” Mary said, laying a hand on Laura’s. “Ask someone to come and find me when you’re done. There’s a… a room upstairs, where we sometimes take our tea. It won’t be fancy, but it’ll be warm.”

 

The promise of a warm cup, and a friend to share it with, cleared the furrowed brow of a little of its care, and a small portion of the smile emerged again. “I’d like that, too,” Laura said, giving a little nod and finally following the Matron (frowning in the doorway at this delay) into the maze of rooms in search of Nathan Bradley. Mary watched her go and looked around at the sea of faces, feeling adrift again. Would she have time for tea today? She often didn’t.

 

As she stood in the lobby, time seemed to slow, the people moving and milling about her like the currents of river. She was remembering, slowly, as if with machinery that had long since ceased to run, that there had been a time before all of this, when her nails had been filled with lint and thread instead of blood, her hands dry in the heat of the weaving room instead of wet with the sweat and summer damp, her shoulders heavy with only a long day’s work, and not the double burden of the dead and those about to die.

 

Seeing Laura, it all seemed so long ago, the boarding houses of the corporation and the walk to the mills in the morning in a chattering, friendly crowd of women, the pitch and whine of the mill, and the rooms within alive with sound and machinery. The ever-present bells and the blessed relief at the end of the day, being allowed to quit one’s station to go home. And then the evenings, spent sitting around the parlor at night and reading aloud or sewing, the voices and ideas flying thick and fast around the room. Such joyful noise, such spirit -- and such friends! Laura’s face was in that crowd,  always smiling, making jokes, laughing. They’d lived together in the boarding house for two years, before Laura married and moved away.

 

_ Was I one of those woman once? I hardly know. _

 

A loud bang brought her back to earth -- a crate being dropped in the road outside. Mary’s eyes flew to the open door, her senses back to bow-string tightness, watching the fraction of the world visible outside the door. More supplies, surely -- they never knew to bring them to the back gate of the building.  “Soldier, that is United States Army property you are mis-handling,” she heard herself saying, moving, quickly, out into the street. “If I find you have broken a single bottle…”

 

And she was back in the sea that had no tide. Supplies to one ward, more patients to another, men to be discharged back to their units on one hand while the day’s surgery cases waited at the other, forms and counter-forms, done in triplicate and signed end over end, bandages to wash and roll, instruments to be sterilized, beds to be stripped, beds to be turned down, beds to be filled with more of the sorriest specimens of humanity the army could produce from the field of battle.

 

Mary hardly saw the time pass, until she had a spare moment to sit down and rest her eyes, only to find herself being shaken, gently, out of a sound sleep. She nearly jolted off of the bench on which she’d been sitting, mortified to be found sleeping at her post, only to see that her rescuer was none other than --

 

“Doctor Foster. My...apologies,” she began, trying to sit up and blink life back into her tired eyes while Doctor Foster knelt in front of her, a little amusement in his eyes. “I did not sleep --”

 

But he did not seem ready to scold her. “Your friend asked me to find you,” Foster said kindly, his eyes pointing over to the side of the passage where Laura Bradley stood waiting.

 

“Laura! I am…”

 

“Tired, surely,” Laura supplied, her smile indefatigable. “An understandable condition.”

 

“And in need of a strong cup of tea, I suspect,” Foster added with an uncharacteristically charitable smile, rising from his position in front of Mary and helping her up from the bench on which she had been sitting. “For which I leave you in Mrs. Bradley’s capable hands.”

 

“Thank you, Doctor Foster,” Laura said, smiling after him in thanks. “Well, shall we go and mount an attack upon the tea-table?” she offered, holding out her arm as though they might go for a stroll in the park and not up a rather abused set of stairs. Mary took her arm and climbed the stairs with her, grateful for the support.

 

“How did you find your brother in law?” she remembered to ask, opening the door to the large room that served as parlor, chapel, and day room to the nurses and the rest of the hospital.

 

“As well as can be expected, in the circumstances,” the other woman acknowledged with a solemn note in her voice. “I found him clean, and in a clean bed, and I suppose that is all I have a right to expect. Though I am sure we could have done without the sermon,” she added with a bemused note in her voice.

 

“Sermon?” Mary had a hard time believing Reverend Hopkins would have spoken at length unless Laura had asked it of him -- he was not the sort, she had found, to go charging in where he was not wanted. She lit the spirit stove underneath the kettle and waited for the water to come back up to temperature, rummaging in a cabinet and producing, from its depths, a battered tin in which she knew a few cookies to be resident. (They would be hard, but a few dips in the tea would produce the necessary change in their consistency for human consumption.)

 

“The nurse on Nathan’s ward. Breezed in and treated me to a long fol-de-rol about how arduously she had been working to make sure he was well, and how slavishly she had toiled over him.”

 

Mary’s face fell. “So you have met Miss Hastings, then.” 

 

“Indeed.” Laura considered the flame under the spirit stove. “Is she always like that, or was she feeling particularly put-upon today? Her speech had a touch of martyrdom in it.”

 

“Miss Hastings is forever put-upon,” Mary acknowledged with a sigh, arranging the cookies on a battered plate and setting it out on the table. “She is never at home but when she is being praised, and never working but when she can be seen and commended for it. Of all my nurses she is best and worst all in one person. She is the most qualified ...and the least willing to actually work.”

 

Laura’s eyes went wide as she settled into her chair. “ _ Your _ nurses? You mean to say you have charge of them?”

 

“I have that ...pleasure, yes.”

 

Her friend laughed with appreciation at her pause before ‘pleasure’. “A job not without its challenges, I’m sure.”

 

The head nurse of Mansion House sighed, calling to mind her various staff with no small measure of dismay. “The rest are...a fine lot, as fine as any group of women in Virginia, I am sure. But what I would give for ten New England girls,” Mary mused with a wishful eye, removing the kettle from the little flame and setting it on the table between the two women.

 

Mrs. Bradley nodded sagely. “I had half a mind to tell your Miss Hastings that she would not have known hard work until she had been given charge of four looms in the weaving room for a twelve hour day in the middle of a New England July, and taken on a fifth when a friend went home sick, but I did not think it worth my while. She seems the type that would have sniffed her nose at being told off by a ...a mere factory hand.”

 

“And in that you would be correct,” Mary confirmed. “Being British, she has the natural-born snobbery of that race, and yet at the same time none of its circumspection. I was appointed over her,” she explained, ignoring, for the present moment, the other various and sundry vagaries of hospital protocol that Miss Hastings also took offence with, “and she has not yet forgiven me for it.”  _ Nor stopped speaking of it,  _ she almost added with a frown.

 

“And doubtless never will,” Laura added knowledgeably. “I think I know the type.” She picked up one of the cookies and, testing the weight in her hand, dipped it into the tea without (thankfully) testing it on her teeth first. “But your Doctor Foster seems a good one,” she added, placing a particular emphasis on  _ your _ with a twinkle in her eye, the same sense of possession resting on it as...

 

Mary looked at her friend, feeling a little indignant at the implication. “He is not _my_ Doctor Foster,” she corrected, watching powerlessly as Laura smiled and rolled her eyes, setting aside her cookie on her saucer.

 

“Mary, I watched him shout one orderly awake and bodily shake another. For you he knelt and took your hands, and moderated his voice, and smiled when you came awake as though the sun were coming out. I think it safe to say he is  _ your _ Doctor Foster, whether you wish him to be or no.” She smiled, considering the matter carefully. “He has a pleasing aspect.”

 

“He has a  _ wife,” _ Mary cautioned.

 

“And where, pray tell, is this Mrs. Foster?” Laura asked, studying her friend with merry mischief in her eyes, playing the matchmaker. (Mary was now remembering that she had done quite a bit at home in Manchester.) “Every physician’s wife I knew shared in his work. I do not see her here.”

 

“California, I think.”  _ Or some such place, far away from here.  _ She confessed she had thought of it, once. But only once, and only briefly! No, Laura was mistaken in his regard for her. 

 

“Well, then.”

 

Mary looked at her friend’s obvious suggestion and let her mouth drop open. “Laura!”

 

“Some people are ill suited to each other, Mary!” the New Englander replied with obvious feeling. “Some marry too early, and some not early enough! And you always liked a bookish man -- that German fellow, the chemist -- what was his name? You were walking out with him when Harry and I were courting. Van Ohn…”

 

“Von Olnhausen,” Mary pronounced sadly, the name heavy on her tongue. Laura’s face fell, recognizing, as she always could, that there was some piece of information she was missing here.  _ Should I tell her?  _ “I...I married him,” she found herself saying. “He ...died. Last year.”

 

“Oh, Mary.” Laura reached out and took her hand, all merriment cast aside. “I’m sorry.”

 

Somehow she couldn’t find her voice, her throat closed up and dry.  _ It was a better death than some have here. He was at home, and comfortable, and loved. And I was with him _ . 

 

She could see, in her mind’s eye, the bedside table, with its bottles and basins, the cloth draped just so at the washbowl’s side, stained a vivid red where she had wiped the blood from his mouth so many times in that last hour. How white his hands had been upon the counterpane! He’d tried so hard to reassure her he was in no pain, but no disguise could last past death.  She knew the truth of that now more than ever.

 

She’d seen that bedside every night her first few weeks at Mansion House. It had faded since then, but here it was again, vivid as ever.

 

For a moment the two women hung their heads in silent contemplation, Mary taking a sip of her rapidly cooling tea and wishing she hadn’t said anything. Finally Laura, recovering herself, gave a brief, sad laugh. “It  _ would _ have been him, wouldn’t it?” she realized aloud. “He loved so much to nettle you and watch you fume at him. You always took his jokes so seriously!”

 

Mary smiled, remembering the evenings Laura was speaking of, their group of friends perched on chairs and settees in the parlor of one boarding house or another, debating politics and the news of the day. Laura’s Harry was there, and some of the other mechanics, David and Joseph and little Gideon and the rest, and some of the other women from their boarding house, Louisa and Beatrice and Hannah and Martha and Maggie James and Maggie Clare -- and Gustave, with his great blue eyes, laughing at her from his seat near the chimney, twirling the ends of his mustache and grinning. How her face had burned to listen to his jokes, his calm replies to her impassioned answers! She smiled at the memory. For so long her thoughts of Gustave had been of his death.  _ I haven’t thought about the happy times in a long while. _

 

Laura caught her hand again, and she looked up, meeting those kind brown eyes again, her gaze so wonderfully sincere and warm. “You must miss him a great deal.”

 

“Thank you. I...I do.” Mary looked down at her tea and suddenly felt very small -- and somehow incomplete. It was a feeling she had struggled with often in the wake of Gustave’s death, as if a whole part of her being, an arm or a leg, had been carved away. She’d filled the hole with her work and with her patients as she might fill a wound with lint, but now, thinking of him again, it all seemed to fall away.  _ I miss him.  _ She hadn’t let herself say it in a long, long time. “I didn’t ask about your husband,” she said quickly, trying to change the subject. Laura blushed and shrugged.

 

“There’s not much to tell, really -- he’s also with the 13th...wherever they are now. It … doesn’t quite seem like home without him. Charlie misses him more than I do,” She said fondly, before realizing that Mary didn’t know who Charlie was.  Her face fell. “Our son,” she explained, though she sounded sad to say it.  _ I’m sad because you have no son to share with me,  _ her apologetic eyes seemed to say. 

 

They hadn’t spoken of children before now. But still, she knew -- for no mother would have brought her child into such a place as this.

 

“How old is he?” Mary asked, trying to push past it, show that she was beyond such things, that she did not feel the lack as keenly as she did.  _ He wished for a large family; he told me so, more than once. And how we tried! _

 

“Three,” Laura managed. Mary recalled the tumbling, adorable messes her nephews  had been when they were that age, and could almost form an image of young Charlie, with his parents’ dark hair (curling like Harry’s did) and his father’s round, laughing face. “How long is it since you’ve been home?” her friend asked suddenly, also obviously wishing, as Mary had, for a way to change the subject. She heard the word  _ home _ and knew that Laura meant Manchester. 

 

“Three years,” she replied. “We lived in Boston for a time.”

 

A nod. “It’s changed, since the war started. The factories keep shorter days -- and you don’t see young men in the streets. The lecture halls are packed with talk of abolition and patriotism and everyone is knitting something for a brother. It’s a quieter place. I am not sure I like it.”

 

Mary tried to think of a quiet Manchester and failed, utterly. The noise had always seemed so much a part of the town that to take it away was to remove everything. But she did not have long to linger on the thought -- there was a loud knock at the door and Doctor Foster appeared from behind it before either woman could rise from her chair.

 

“Nurse Phinney -- I hate to interrupt you, but the soldier in Ward Five with the foot injury needs to go in for surgery. The wound’s turned gangrenous and I want to save as much of the leg as possible.”

 

“Go,” Laura urged, setting aside her own tea cup. “I shouldn’t keep you. I”ll clean up here.”

 

Mary smiled thankfully at her for that, and followed Foster downstairs and into the operating room, too caught up in the needs of the moment to think of anything but the soldier and his poor gangrenous foot.

 

It was a difficult procedure -- feet always were -- and there was little time for idle thought, only the razor-sharp edge of the mind that heard a command and instantly obeyed. It wasn’t until the operation was finished and Doctor Foster was washing his hands that Mary, catching sight of his profile in the dim light from the lantern, remembered what Laura had said about him.  _ He has a fine aspect. _

 

_ Yes,  _ Mary agreed, silently, before she really knew that she was doing it,  _ he does.  _ She watched him wash his hands, soap-suds catching at the bloodstains on his skin, fingers playing in and out of each other, trying to scrub away the surgery’s grime. His hands, she realized, were like Gustave’s hands -- capable and quick. Watching his fingers ply their needle in and out of sutures and ligatures was like watching her husband tinker with one of his mechanical toys, an exercise she could have happily watched for hours. She caught herself smiling, and  shook her head a little to clear it.  _ You are a nurse at this hospital, assigned by Superintendent Dix for the supervision of the efficient running of the nurses, and you did not come here for idle games and parlor tricks,  _ she reminded herself, fixing her very best businesslike gaze back on, professional and detached once more.

 

“Here,” Doctor Foster said, suddenly, stepping away from the washbasin to dry his hands. “The water’s still warm.”  She stepped up to the basin, running the bar of soap through her hands a few times before scrubbing at the blood on her own nails.  “Your friend Mrs. Bradley was very complimentary of you,” Foster said conversationally from somewhere at her shoulder.

 

“She was?”  _ When did you speak to Laura? Surely not when you came to find me.   _

 

_ And why are  _ **_you_ ** _ still thinking of it, all these hours later?  _

 

“Her kinsman’s wound needed tending and I happened to be passing. She mentioned your name -- and spoke at length of your life in Manchester.” He laid the towel aside and perched on the edge of the table waiting for her to finish her own hand-washing.  “I didn’t take the Baroness for a factory hand.”

 

There it was -- that teasing in his voice, testing her! And he  _ would  _ use that infernal nickname.  The old anger flared up again, the defensive edge she always found when someone was trying to belittle her. She found the feeling coming on stronger, though, with Doctor Foster than with anyone else. “If you have some aversion to --

 

“I meant only that you don’t seem the type,” Foster began again, trying to moderate his words. “More educated. Polished.”

 

_ Oh, Doctor Foster, how little you know us.  _ Did he not realize he was only digging himself in deeper? Her hands were scrubbing furiously only because she couldn’t do what she wished to do and turn neatly on her heel to leave. “You clearly don’t know many New England mill girls, Doctor Foster. It is a personal point of pride that we are learned women.” 

 

Well, if he hadn’t seen his error before, he saw it now. The smile quickly vanished. “No, you’re right. I don’t.” 

 

Mary looked up, her hands still. Was that...contrition she heard in his voice?  _ Goodness me _ \-- and an apology behind his eyes, too. Her heart softened in surprise at finding either. “But if they are anything like you, Nurse Phinney, I would relish their company.”

 

_ Did he just...no, no, certainly not. _

 

But she did not have time to think on it further -- he left her at the washbowl just as quickly as he’d summoned her to surgery. 

 

To stand and talk with her when he usually was the first to leave, to make sure the water was warm for her, to...to pay her compliments, in his half-teasing way, but mean them sincerely. 

 

But now that Mary thought about it, he  _ had _ changed, since his bout with ‘influenza’, not merely in the manner of his medicine, or the sureness in his hands at surgery, but in other things, smaller things, things she had not seriously considered until now. He was not quite so short with others any more, nor so quick to judgement. And where before he had merely  _ mocked _ , now she found him  _ teasing,  _ smiling at her as he did so, and watching for what she would say, actually listening where before he would have disregarded her response entirely.

 

And she found herself ... enjoying it. The brief comradeship offered by his sickroom had brought them closer -- that could not be denied. For a week they had sunk together into the very depths of his despair, and climbed back out again, and it had ...changed them, as a blacksmith’s hammer folds one piece of iron into another, strengthening and binding at the same time. And to have an ally, a  _ friend,  _ even, where before she had been alone, helped her more than she could say. She found herself  _ valuing  _ his company, his opinions, his little moods, looking forward to the next time she could seek his opinion. Even when he would laugh at her a little she found some joy in it.

 

She remembered, suddenly and with a great flush of shame, who else it had been who made her angry like he did. Her husband’s laughing, smiling face seemed to linger where Foster had been standing near the washstand, leaning back against it just as he had done. Laura’s voice came back again to haunt her.  _ I think he is  _ **_your_ ** _ Doctor Foster, whether you wish him to be or not. _

 

Mary shook her head again and dried her hands. _No, no, certainly not. He teases and berates the others just the same._ _There’s nothing special there for me._

 

She squared her shoulders and went to go find Laura.

 

Her friend was right back where Mary predicted she would be -- sitting next to her brother-in-law’s bed, a book perched carefully upon her knees. Mary thought she might be reading aloud to him, but coming closer, she saw that Private Bradley’s eyes were closed, and Laura’s lips did not move. She cleared her throat, and the New Hampshirewoman looked up, smiling. 

 

“Did it go well, your surgery?”

 

“As well as can be expected, in the circumstances,” Mary said, feeling she would gain nothing by withholding from Laura what some would see as an awful truth. She’d spent the whole day in the ward -- the truth was already all around her, whether she would have it be or not. “He’ll keep most of the leg.”

 

Laura nodded. “I think I owe you an apology, Mary -- for what I said earlier about...your colleague. I didn’t mean to offend.” She glanced down at her book and shrugged a little. “But I have one question to ask you -- if I may.” She looked to Mary for permission, and, seeing her nod, swallowed and fixed Mary with a careful stare. “Why  _ did _ you come down here to nurse?” she asked plainly, looking up at her friend from her chair. “You never said.” Mary felt her skin run cold.

 

“Because I think I know,” Laura continued. Her voice was low and reassuring, gentle in her judgement. “Do you remember Becky Nagle?”  There was nothing special in the name -- save the memory that went with it. Mary felt her heart freeze again. A pretty girl, blonde, from Nashua. She’d roomed in the same boarding house as they had, no one special -- until the accident. Her hair caught in a shuttle, and her scalp had been... Mary winced at the memory even now. They’d had to stop the mill to pull her out. Even now she could still smell the blood on the weaving room floor.  “You tore yourself to pieces when it happened,” Laura remembered. “Wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t eat. Convinced it was your fault, even though we all told you a hundred times we’d heard Becky ignore you -- and everyone else -- about her hair! But it had to be  _ your _ fault. You had to blame someone, so you blamed yourself. You were always taking on what wasn’t yours to take.”

 

“And I think -- I think  _ this _ is your penance to yourself -- like staying awake was penance for Becky. Taking yourself away from everyone, working yourself to the bone, writing her mother. It wasn’t your fault, Mary,” Laura said with utter sincerity.  “As Gustave was not your fault.” She paused, making sure she had not said too much, and swallowed again. “There’s  a time to every purpose under heaven -- weeping and laughing both.  You don’t have to punish yourself for the rest of your life. You  _ are  _ allowed to laugh again. I just thought...you should remember that.”

 

Mary nodded, too overcome to speak.

 

Why had she come? It was an honest question. Because of some patriotic fervor, some flag-waving push for glory? Some pathetic, hand-wringing wish to be of use? Because the house in Boston was empty, and she felt alone? Or,  _ was  _ it because, as some had said, she wished to try and save Gustave again?  _ Had  _ she come down to Alexandria trying to atone for a life she couldn’t save?

 

She hardly knew herself, but when Laura said it like that... “Has anyone told you lately that you’re wise?” Mary asked, feeling a tear pricking at her eye and trying to will it back into submission.  _ I will not cry, I mustn’t cry, crying is for widows and orphans, but not the head nurses of hospitals and not for me.  _

 

Laura snorted at that. “Not wise -- just an interfering old besom who wants what’s best for you. But I’ll take the compliment as kindly as it’s meant.”

 

_ Oh, Laura. How I’ve missed having friends to set me straight.  _ “Do you mean to stay long? I”ll sit with you -- “

 

“I’ll be fine. Just a little while longer, and then I’ll head to my boarding house. He’s sleeping and he doesn’t need me here for that. And you must have work to do.” She reached up and clasped Mary’s hand. “You’re a good friend, Mary, and a good person. I hope someone here remembers it for you when I’ve gone home.” She smiled up at Mary, her hand warm and reassuring. “You should go get some rest, if you can. Don’t need you falling asleep in any more hospital corridors.”

 

Mary smiled, remembering that afternoon, and nodded, leaving Laura at her brother-in-law’s bedside and heading upstairs, for her room. She’d find  the Matron, and ask her to wake her in a few hours. It was quiet enough for now.

 

“Nurse Phinney!” It was Doctor Foster, coming from another ward. Mary hastily wiped her eyes again, brushing down her apron and taking a deep breath. “Is something wrong?”

 

How concerned he looked! Mary, hastily wiping her eyes again, looked up at him and gave a short laugh, another tear beading at her eye. **_Your_** _Doctor Foster._ _Whether you wish him to be or no._ “Nothing at all, Doctor. Absolutely nothing.”

 

He did not seem convinced of this answer, studying her face a moment with unhidden care, but left her regardless, his steps loud in the corridor.

 

 _A time to every purpose under heaven,_ she reminded herself. _A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace._

 

She watched him leave and laid a hand carefully across her chest, listening for a moment to her heart against her hand. At the base of the stairs he turned back for a moment, and smiled reassuringly at her, and she felt her pulse flutter beneath her fingers in surprise and joy.

 

_ Your Doctor Foster. _ It had, she had to admit, a pleasing ring to it. She allowed herself a smile for the thought, and went to go find her own bed.

**Author's Note:**

> We see so much of Mercy Street from Mary's perspective, and I wanted to sneak someone else, an outside arbiter, in there and confirm, for her, what I'm sure Mary has started feeling towards Jed in 1.3, that he has feelings for her and she has feelings for him. So we have Laura, in the great tradition of outspoken 19th century New England women. Mary's very guarded, so I needed someone she trusted, someone she knew. In the Lowell system, the corporations running the mills often subsidized boarding houses for their employees, where 30 or 40 women (and they would usually be young women) would room together. I picture this as being a lot like the dorms in the all-women's college I attended, and have sketched accordingly.
> 
> The Lowell system of the early to mid 19th century has long been of interest to me, so inspiration was drawn from several books on the subject, including Belles of New England, by William Moran, Loom and Spindle, by Harriet Robinson, and selected articles from The Lowell Offering, the literary magazine published by and for the mill girls in the 1850s and 60s. The backstory of Becky Nagle's accident was lifted rather shamelessly from So Far From Home: The Diary of Mary Driscoll, a Dear America book (Did anyone else read those? I had a whole shelf-full) set in Lowell in the 1840s. 
> 
> I hope everyone's also enjoyed Gustave in the background -- I most emphatically am ignoring the props department's opinions on his personal appearance and am imagining a tall, academic looking fellow -- more like Philip Norton in Grantchester, but with a 19th century mustache and sideburns. A much better match for Mary.
> 
> The 13th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, the unit that the Bradley brothers belong to, was present at the early Virginia campaigns taking place in 1862, around the same time as the show, and was comprised of men from the Manchester area of New Hampshire.
> 
> Any medical mistakes (or other mistakes) entirely my own. Much thanks to MontmartreParapluie for the beta read.


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